<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Defy the Night by JellyDishes</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26473933">Defy the Night</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes'>JellyDishes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Age: Origins</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emotional Constipation, F/M, Pre-Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 09:27:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>406</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26473933</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, talking with Oghren made Tsurin Tabris feel vulnerable in a way that wasn't unpleasant, for all that it made her duck her head down towards her hands so he wouldn't see her expression.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Oghren/Female Warden (Dragon Age)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Defy the Night</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You told me once you were afraid the sky would swallow you up, right?” Tsurin Tabris asked Oghren one night in a hushed voice. She hugged her knees so he wouldn’t see her hands shake. “What if it did? What if you just… floated away and the world went on without you?”</p><p>Oghren has been snappish as of late, ever since Tsurin had told him that she refused to watch him kill himself by inches anymore and forbade him to drink, growling and silent by turns. But tonight he had been quiet. His own hands shook as much as she pretended hers were not, and he wiped them across his sweating brow as he directed bleary eyes up, then back down to her face. “What’s this about?” His normal bluster wasn’t there. He sounded tired. Exhausted, even.</p><p>“Nothing,” she said quickly, feeling guilty for bothering him when he’d been so sick and on edge in the days since he’d been cut off from the only way he’d known how to cope for long years. Then, “Everything. I- do you ever get scared, Oghren?”</p><p>“All the time,” he said immediately. He’d turned his face away from hers, and busied himself with some small task she guessed didn’t even need doing. “Have to be dead, not to be. ’s the way life is.”</p><p>“I guess.” Tsurin pillowed her cheek on one knee and watched the silhouetted curve of his back where he was bent. He looked like one of those statues of the paragons, she thought, only better. Real and solid and human, for lack of a better word. The paragons in his stories didn’t get scared, of girls or betrayal or being left behind. They didn’t drink or want to abandon their duty the way he and Tsurin had seemed hell-bent on doing for most of this journey, and for that alone, she admired him more than any dead dwarf who had been made greater than anyone living had any hope to be. “You keep going, though, right? You’re still here.”</p><p>“So are you,” said that shape in the dark. Without being able to really see each other, his voice sounded more than a bit faltering, more than a bit uncertain. Questioning.</p><p>Tsurin turned away, too, burying her face in her knees. “Haven’t decided that the sky is better than mortal peril yet,” she said, and received grunted approval in return. And that, it seemed, was that.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>